Went to a great conference organized by the MIT Media Lab's Media Fabrics group yesterday. The group's director, Glorianna Davenport, chaired a great series of talks about the group's legacy in multimedia, outlined the particular challenges in multimedia production, and introduced some notable alumni who've gone on to found start-ups that continue to tackle some of these challenges.
The overview of the group's legacy, starting from Davenport's days as a graduate student in the 70's, was impressive. I was especially surprised to see how many of the projects her group pioneered wound up in my classroom as an elementary school student in the early 90's. Their use of HyperCard (hypertext creation software) as an artistic medium informed the way I created media when I was a kid. Their exploration of interactivity in film (as seen through the Aspen Project ) paved the way for those great educational tools on laser disk, like à la rencontre de Philippe (where you tore around the streets of Paris bumming Gauloises in cafes, and looking for a place to crash, if memory serves!)
Davenport then introduced Confectionary, a multimedia publishing tool that is not unlike YouTube. There are several key differences that I find charming and disconcerting at the same time. The tool has a great-looking interface; fully enveloped in the classy, arthouse aesthetic of some of the older net.art practitioners. (Courier font, the grey and white simple interface, a sendup to the old Macintosh days of the mid-90's.) Its look is very anti-YouTube, and although the idea is the same, Confectionary's goal is to provide a social media publishing environment without all the noise, thoughtlessness, and irrelevance of YouTube. It dawned on me that this group is dedicated not only to exploring themes of social media, but also exploring the relationships between the object produced and the aesthetic choices of the interface. By repackaging YouTube as something more formidable, even intimidating, the produced work is repurposed. This is a space where the mundane becomes art and the "prosumer" transcends to become an aesthete.
I looked up Davenport when I got home, and started reading a whitepaper of hers, "Improvisational Media Fabric", that fully captured the spirit of her presentation (despite having been written in 2002). One key quote:
"...digital cinema is freeing itself from its linear celluloid base; it is evolving into a "meta-cinema" where one's own memories, perceptions, actions, and desires connect with others through a continuous process of communicating, interweaving, and reconfiguring tradeable bits within a universal media environment."
The ability of the media maker to be a collector, a scrapbooker, in addition to storyteller, is what's most important here. It is in the glorification of what Davenport called the "improvised collection" that our stories become art. Technically, the creation of that art is aided by its interface, its frame, or presentation. This is an electrifying idea to explore: is the interface through which we interact with the story just as integral to the narrative as the story itself?
1 comment:
Harlo,
I wish I had had a chance to meet you and chat during the event. Perhaps that can happen in July.
I really like what you wrote about myconfectionary.com, especially the way in which you highlighted the aesthetics of the interface. The aesthetics are based on the functionality of making new reflections, a poetics of movie, still and text. This makes it very unlike YouTube, in activity and reflection.
Aside from its looks, YouTube is mostly about shoving an artifact (the movie) into a public space. The movie generally is made elsewhere/on your desktop or in your camera. While, YouTube is trying to do something with sequencing, the act of reflection will be limited by the primary underlying philosophy.
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